My brand-spankin’ new MacBook Pro, hopefully without dent, has been shipped!

I ordered it a scant few days after they were refreshed, ultimately goaded by some free* money that arrived in the mail. There was some hand-wringing about which model and what, if any, modifications to the stock specs I wanted. In the end, I went with the lower of two 15″ models (2.0 GHz quad-core CPU instead of 2.2/2.3), but beefed it up to the high-res, anti-glare screen. I gave up some HD space, CPU speed, and video card RAM, but saved $400. It’s hard to say whether it was worth it, since this is a machine I will be giving a lot of attention to for many years, but in the end it will be a significant upgrade to my current machine (2007-era white MacBook with integrated graphics technology that has no 3D-acceleration at all) and I will rationalize away any mistakes I made with my choice over time.

What should I do with my (soon-to-be) old machine? I’ve never upgraded my personal laptop before, so I don’t know what use it is to me. I guess you could say its ancestor was my old beige-box custom PC used through the end of college and several years afterward. Its fate post-MB-purchase was to become a largely dormant paperweight, occasionally used for running an open-source DDR clone and old Windows games. My wife has a recent MBP, so she doesn’t need it.

I could recycle it through Apple, netting a few hundred bucks. I could donate it and write it off, but that money would probably be less and I won’t get it until next year. I could sell it on Craigslist or Ebay, but I’d have to deal with all of the potential hassle both of those represent. I could just turn it off, put it away somewhere, and forget about it. I could launch it into the air and shoot it with a gun, skeet-style. Hmmm.

* Not actually free